The present invention relates to the restoring of objects, and more particularly, this invention relates to the restoring of individual objects, including object data and object attributes.
The current version of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Client (5.5.0) includes support for backup and restore of Microsoft Active Directory (AD) on a Windows 2003 Domain Controller (DC) server as part of the System State. In order to restore the AD, the Active Directory Domain Controller must be rebooted into Active Directory Restore mode. The AD can only be restored with the other bootable components. In other words, the whole System State needs to be restored.
TSM restore does not support any granularity for Active Directory; the entire AD most be restored to recover a single object. Fortunately, there are usually more than one Active Directory controllers who replicate each other's data. When one DC is restored to an older state, it pulls all changes from other DCs, so an older restore won't overwrite the newer data. This is called non-authoritative restore.
When a backup version needs to overwrite current data, a technique called authoritative restore is used. A certain command line utility (ntdsutil.exe) can be used in this case to authoritatively restore AD's sub-trees or even leaf objects.
Although individual object restore is currently possible using (ntdsutil.exe), it has a number of limitations including: requiring the domain controller to be reboot into a special mode, and then reboot back to the normal mode after restore is done; requiring the entire System State to be restored even if only an AD is to be restored; involving a number of manual steps; and not being integrated within TSM (as it requires use of external utilities, manual copying of the files, etc.).
Therefore, it would be advantageous to allow restoration of only those desired files and/or file attributes and data, while keeping the server online and accessible.